#HowManyIsTooMany? Tallying Up One Day’s Worth of Hashtags

It’s one of the great modern-day pleasures: the near-immediate and constant stream of Twitter chatter that accompanies any big television event, be it bizarre Oscar speeches or odd facial expressions during the State of the Union address.

Many of these 140-character quips are hashtagged — #Oscars or #SOTU or #WorldCup — as a way for people to congregate virtually around a single moment. Hashtags have become so ubiquitous that advertisers are not only posting about and hashtagging popular topics, they are trying to create trending topics of their own. Companies include these clever (and not-so-clever) hashtags at the end of television commercials, overlaid on screen during TV shows, and printed on ad displays inside stores and on outdoor billboards.

But is anyone actually quipping on Twitter about company-promoted hashtags? I tried to find out.

On a recent Sunday, I took note of every hashtag I could find during the course of an otherwise typical weekend day. Then I checked Twitter to see who was talking about it.

The Road Test

I left my Los Angeles residence at 9 a.m. to get coffee. Before traveling two blocks, the first example was splashed across the façade of the Equinox gym on Sunset Blvd.: #preapologize. Four blocks later, at the intersection of La Cienega Blvd. and Holloway Drive, I saw a billboard for the new SLS Las Vegas hotel with the hashtag #belegendary. There would be several more hashtags on billboards and store displays throughout the day.

Between noon and 3 p.m., I spotted 29 hashtags — 29! — on the MLB Network. They ranged from H-P’s #bendtherules to Kingsford charcoal’s #getoffyourgas to the Washington Nationals’ #natitude. During Sunday evening episodes of HGTV’s “House Hunters” and ABC’s “Wipeout,” 25 more hashtags flashed across my TV screen—though 13 of them were the names of programs the networks themselves were promoting.

Topping it all off, an ad for the local 11 p.m. news appeared to use hashtags simply for emphasis, the way quotation marks are often used: #eye-opening … #exclusive … #powerful … #changing … #eyewitness … all flashed across the screen between shots of TV reporters at the scenes of their breaking news stories. I didn’t count these.

In nearly every case, the immediate responses on Twitter to non-network ads were slim to none. I examined the chatter during the 20 minutes following each hashtag’s appearance on television and only one, #pretzellovesongs, elicited more than one substantive response. That hashtag, used by Wendy’s in ads for its limited-time pretzel burger bun, drew five tweets in 20 minutes.

In a single day, 60 legitimate hashtags found me both indoors and out.

The Results

Vibrant interaction on Twitter, though, might not be the only point. Marketers say the idea isn’t so much that people will use the hashtag the minute they see it, but that consumers might search the meaning of the hashtag on their phones or computers at some point to learn more about a product.

Indeed, that’s precisely what I was doing in my experiment. (What does “pre-apologize” mean anyway?) And that explained the large number of what I would call “meta-hashtag tweets”: tweets that explained the meaning behind an ambiguous hashtag.

Expedia’s tweets, for example, helped me understand that when someone adds #throwmeback to a #tbt (throwback Thursday) photo, the person is automatically entered into a contest to win free travel.

Twitter tells advertisers that a good hashtag is a “call to action” that users can employ in “self-expression,” “human connection” or “content discovery” online. But for me, after a day spent in front of the TV and poring over glib Twitter posts, all I wanted was some real-life conversation.